iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Didn't someone release a decompiled scrape of the entire Adobe creative suite earlier this week?

I think we are not quite good enough at counterinsurgency as a disciple (or a culture) to survive the political results of that, unless the 2028 Congress does unprecedented structural reform to remove the biases the Constitution gives to conservatives.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 7h

The initial crisis is only one part of the overall problem: a media ecosystem incapable of speaking truth to power, or explaining it to the public, has made us uniquely vulnerable to a violent and explosive schism because a full third of the population is in thrall to obvious, self-serving lies.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 7h

The trick is doing that without the neoConfederates taking it as causus belli. Trump might do everyone a favor of meeting the Reaper before he meets justice, but there is a strong and well-financed interest in letting traitorous (conservative) bygones be bygones, stretching back to the Nixon era.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 8h

Right, my fear is not that they're competent enough to pull off a coup, it's that they're dumb enough to try and the countercoup still ends American democracy in a civil war or quasi-authoritarian state that devolves naturally into totalitarian dicatorship.

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Liberal Currents @liberalcurrents.com · 10h

“What most political analysts miss is how strong and specific the authoritarian appeal is for white evangelicals, and how critical it is to at least weaken it. The roots of this confluence go back decades, if not centuries, and are deeply entwined with white evangelical theology itself.”

liberalcurrents.com

You Can't Run From Christian Nationalism

White evangelicals are the single most influential voting bloc in American politics. They cannot be ignored.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

When the shoe's on the other foot we're seeing some Dem candidates adapt and seize the momentum handed to them by circumstances (media not being able to conceal conservative misrule on all fronts), and some still in a defensive/servile crouch. Will make for an interesting caucus.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Just as the fear of the Red Wave doomed some winnable races in 2022, fighting from the back foot against the presumption of loss is hard to overcome. Well, for Republicans, at least. That's table stakes for Democrats, because the media like conservatives and want the conservatives to win.

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 12/08/2026

And at present, defending moral and political principles is our most important challenge. I'm of the opinion that no level of technological and economic development is worth it if you end up losing your constitutional rights and democratic government. But both of those things are in peril.

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

imagine if the mainstream media covered Republicans' number one donor — the biggest political donor in US history! — and his controversial views with as much scrutiny as they covered Hasan Piker's

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Cheaper than the two expensive degrees that got me to similar conclusions (oh boy, this shit is fucked, isn't it?)

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Fox and Friends would be calling for a public lynching of the entire Biden family on White House lawn, skip the trials.

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Noah Berlatsky @nberlat.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

you could absolutely impeach him for urging Iran to destroy multiple american cities as a "joke."

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

A lot of centrists aren't there yet, many never will be, and and even many liberals think there wasn't anything implicitly wrong with GWOT even if they have funny feelings about the domestic police state and quibbles about Iraq. The liberal theory of "what next" dies at the throat, from insecurity.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

That would mean leaving the defensive crouch on foreign affairs and military policy that's held the party in place for thirty years and it'd have to confront the history of deeply illiberal use of American power, including by liberals, and wholly abandoning bipartisan consensus.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

You can see your favorite influencer or artist or comedian elsewhere! Promise! They're all on as many platforms as they can be, that's how they make a living, promise! 😭😭😭

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Truly, Instagram seems to be the thing that's impossible to pry people off of 😭

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The Minnesota Nice people laughed and made art of the assholes slipping on black ice and wiping out. It was already one of the highest-turnout and civic-minded states in the union before a militant civic society mobilization. They've lost the state for a generation or a revolution, minimum.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Downside is all the printed schedules are useless (they already are) and it's harder to hold the transit authority accountable for busses that don't show (we already don't). Probably some logistics challenges about bus maintenance and the like too, but solvable.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Usually the right-wing chuds have at least played a couple Paradox games for their Deus Vult fix but maybe the AI grindset evangelicals stick to Stellaris.

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Aftermath @aftermath.site · 02/10/2026

Control Resonant is once again a video game about the wonderful and terrifying possibilities of architecture: aftermath.site/control-resona...

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

We've had a crisis of administrative capacity for decades, probably worsened by our addiction to federalism, but definitely worsened by a large share of the population believing the DMV *must* be a painful bureaucratic experience, and defunding it accordingly.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

But without lots of non-fact knowledge/understanding about how those systems interact and how your choices impact them, people treat politics like a magic black box the same way they do a computer: sometimes the inputs produce desired output, or not, but troubleshooting is for outsourced experts.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Even setting aside current affairs as a hellstorm of propaganda and shocks-for-clicks, basic civic education has degraded a lot even as that information is easier to access than ever - you don't need a library visit to read your state's constitution anymore! It's easy to look up who's on SCOTUS.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Sort of the core tension between technocratic governance and democracy. But I think a big part of the current problem in the US is that the information ecosystem makes it hard for voters to form knowledgeable opinions, or hold actors accountable. Expensive information, complex systems, few levers.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It is apparently notorious in the neighborhood, my first condo board meeting included an extended recital of recent sightings.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

(Was briefly confused you were responding to me but realized it's only because I had already blocked the guy who posted the cartoon with the racism you were very rightly calling out lol)

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I don't love the idea of Arab democracies empowering theocratic politics, but that's because I don't love it anywhere else, either. But it's an entirely different thing to say that those weren't democratic outcomes at all.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I think there's a bipartisan consensus in the US, at least among electeds, that democracy is a good in itself but only if it doesn't, you know, democratically produce outcomes that would be intolerable to other parts of the bipartisan consensus. Not just in foreign policy, either.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The awkward bit where newly-democratized countries (Iraq & the post-Spring) empowered hard-right / Salafist parties because, well, those politics are popular in highly religious countries in the region ... a big "NO, NOT LIKE THAT" moment that was entirely predictable in retrospect.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Well, Third Way exists mostly to sanitize and launder conservative policy and politics into liberal politicians so, that's just the organization doing what it's meant to do.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

As brought to you by the Pro-Life SCOTUS majority that just eagerly overrode lower courts in their haste to execute a woman, whom the state promptly tortured to the edge of death as they botched the attempt. No hells hot enough.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Fugitive Slave Act of the 21st Century, delivered by judicial fiat.

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Jessica Valenti @jessicavalenti.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Republican states are asking the Supreme Court to let them extradite abortion providers. Here's what we know so far

jessica.substack.com

BREAKING: Republicans File Supreme Court Suit to End Shield Laws

9.30.26

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Unfortunately, we've reached the point where that problem has only a passing relationship with a crininal justice system and we're likely going to need a deep overhaul of both situations if we're to get through the century with a semblance of democracy and rule of law.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The chance of conservatives fomenting a coup against the Constitutional order is not low already, and if they are allowed impunity the chance rises quickly to a certainty.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And the ones too dangerous to keep around are generally not unsympathetic murderers and sex criminals, but the existential threats to the social fabric and rule of law: oligarchs and politicians, people with power and the incentives tonuse that power to break whatever holds them to account.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I really appreciate the work you do staring every day for hours and hours into the maw of madness to give the rest of us a reflection of what matters inside the asylum. Truly, thank you for your service.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

A pleasant reminder that sometimes the Olds still get it and know the right side of history when they see it.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Schakowsky out there leaving a stake for Biss to orient off of, some good things still happening in IL09 from time to time.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Very exciting to see the leadership of our commando-rambo military going on like this while we are actively losing our war of choice in the Middle East for the third time in my adulthood. Could have done with a few more keyboard warriors or the odd XX who knew the IRGC orbat backwards and forwards.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

A lot of liberationist, universalist, and egalitarian rhetoric in modern, secular democracies would have been criminal to espose two hundred years ago and we know it because a lot of anarchist writers and organizers died in prison for saying it, kind of stuff.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There's Bakunin (God and the State), who was calling out the authoritarian tendecies of Marxism around the time Lenin was born. Influenced Kropotkin (Conquest of Bread) and Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death). The propaganda of the deed infouenced by this set had, uh, more mixed results tho.

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Ariel Edwards-Levy @aedwardslevy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There is a lot of "oh dear" to go around in the results of this very thorough Pew study on the issues with synthetic samples, but this strikes me as particularly "oh dear" www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...

AI polling results can lean on racial or partisan stereotypes

In many cases, our AI poll took beliefs or attitudes that are reasonably common among a particular subgroup and portrayed them as nearly ubiquitous. For example, our AI poll would indicate that:

97% of Hispanic adults are at least somewhat likely to follow the World Cup (while the actual share is 43%).

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The early vote center in downtown Chicago opens Oct 1 and the ward early vote centers open Oct 19, if I remember right.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

COD is lying to the public about collaboration with ICE in violation of state and local law. I, for one, want the mayoral candidates to weigh in on what we, the lublic should expect from them and from the police forces that ostensibly serve us.

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KPM @kpmcgrath.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Idk, prosecuting the Federalist Society as an organized criminal conspiracy to commit treason could do some wonders for the country, and we might finally disabuse conservatives of the idea that the Patriot Act is only for brown people. Virtuous circles!

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